Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

And How the Right Tools Can Help You Know Where to Grow

By Jennifer Keller

Our entire Stratasan team knows the importance of deeply understanding the needs and desires of the healthcare strategists, marketers, physician liaisons and other decision-makers we serve. We're constantly working to identify our customers' motivations, challenges and struggles, so we can more effectively support them and better tailor our products and services to capably address their top priorities.

It was with this in mind that we recently brought in outside experts to help bridge knowledge gaps and amplify internal understanding of the always complex, always changing acute care, ancillary and payer spaces. This amazing team - highly skilled at conducting in-depth qualitative research and utilizing simple frameworks to capture a central message - served us well, both confirming what we already knew and uncovering many interesting new insights. In this post, we’ll share some common themes from our research, and how we’re pivoting our outreach to more closely align with the ways we provide value.

by Lee Ann Lambdin

I hired a great analyst a few years ago. She was skilled with database programs, understood the complexities of the healthcare market, and had previously been a medical records coder—in short, she was very talented. The longer she was in her position, the more our state data was reported accurately and on a reliable schedule. It was a huge win for me and my team!

Recognizing her capabilities, I asked if she could start running "quarterly standard reports" that present key findings which could influence how our planning, marketing, and business development departments would function and what we would focus on in the weeks and months to come. These quarterly updates would be high-level summaries of our market landscape and would cover everything from our hospital’s market share, trended volume, competitor positions, product lines, payor mix, patient migration patterns and more. 

 

By Tony Camarata

Is your healthcare system failing to meet annual strategic goals due to a lack of organizational alignment? Studies show that the highest-performing healthcare organizations have a strategic plan that sets a clear direction for all functional teams. This plan succeeds or fails depending upon organization-wide understanding of the goals, tactics, and measurable outcomes needed to fulfill the strategic goals. Conversely, if your team is unable to establish alignment, your health system risks stagnation and year-over-year frustration about your inability to meet goals and expectations.  

Here’s a look at how to improve your hospital’s organizational alignment from top to bottom and why getting this right could be the key to meeting your annual strategic goals.

By Tony Camarata

Discussions around “big data” — what it is and why it’s useful — are infiltrating every arena of the healthcare space. Strategic planning, marketing, business development, patient care, and health outcomes are looking to big data for answers. hi 

While the intelligence gained from big data analysis is valuable, there are compelling reasons to believe that working with the right data is far more important than simply having access to, and analysis of, big data.

See Better Results with A Year-Round Planning Process

By Jason Moore

Hospitals have traditionally created an annual strategic plan as a roadmap for achieving growth goals. While still an important step in the growth process, it's becoming clear that a stand alone annual plan won't cut it in today's healthcare world. 

This annual routine has been driven by annual data reporting—a factor that is changing due to increased adoption of the frequently updated all-payer claims data (APCD). Stratasan’s APCD updates monthly, for example, allowing for more frequent market reporting that can lead to plan adjustments.

There is also reason to believe that plans are more widely adopted when more members of the organization are invested in the process. This can be a difficult change in mindset for organizations accustomed to planning that takes place only at the c-suite level.

How can hospitals shift to take advantage of more readily available data insights and make changes that will ensure greater adoption? The answer is an iterative planning process that invites organization-wide input and applies data-backed market insights.

Drive More Patient Volume and Improve Your Bottom Line

By Jackie DeGroat and Megan Reeves

Here’s something you already know: hospitals need physicians in order to drive patient volume. Opening a new service line or expanding an existing one is dependent on successful physician recruitment.

What you may not fully understand is how to involve physicians in a way that engages them at a strategic level. It can be a challenge to incorporate their input, even when you know it’s important to do so. And it can be a particularly difficult prospect for hospitals who have not prioritized this approach in the past, as it means a change to the status quo.

But the reality is that involving physicians in your planning can improve their connection to your hospital and their loyalty to your mission, vision, and values. It can also increase their buy-in, leading them to be more productive and willing participants in service line growth. Additionally, physicians have a firsthand understanding of your patient’s needs. Their input into your strategic growth strategy can lead to better alignment with the needs of your market.

A More Efficient Way to Boost Revenue and Attract Patients

By Tony Camarata

Historically, market performance has been measured through market share, a single snapshot of patients treated. While market share can be used to measure market position, it fails to deliver the complex intricacies of patient choice, which are vital to improving care delivery. Hospitals planners need better visibility into the full continuum of patient choice in order to deliver the right services for their patients.

Share of wallet provides this added visibility by not only showing the patient treatment snapshot, but also showing everywhere else your patients are utilizing care. These insights will lead your team down the path of determining if you can provide that same care to your patients and potentially attract them to choose your hospital over your competition.

A Behind the Curtain Look into Stratasan’s Planning Process

By Jason Moore

As we near the end of 2018, goal setting and annual planning are top of mind for all of us. Strategic planning is a useful process for organizations of all shapes and sizes and a well-defined strategic plan is key for companies that want to thrive, grow, and remain competitive. In this post, I want to give you a peek behind the curtain into our process to help you better understand how we think about and plan for the future of our business.

Stratasan’s co-founder and CTO, Brian Dailey, introduced Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt to our executive leadership team (ELT)* in late 2017. After reading and discussing it as a group, we decided to implement this methodology to our strategic planning process. Starting this process so late in the year though meant our 2018 strategy was not completed until the year had already begun. This limited how effective our 2018 planning could be, but we still recognized that we’d landed on a good process. This year, we were motivated to start earlier and are already seeing positive synergy around our 2019 strategies as a result.

Measure Effectiveness and Communicate Value to Your Organization

By Brian Dailey

One of the great things about attending the Society of Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) annual conference is talking directly with our customers. If one were to build a Venn diagram of SHSMD attendees and Stratasan clientele, the circles would very nearly overlap.

A common thread I've heard in these conversations is that proving the value of planning and marketing to the rest of the business can be very difficult. Businesses want to see a very clear return on investment, and it's on marketing and planning departments to not only do their jobs, but also communicate the value of their jobs to the rest of the organization. This is especially true as the industry continues to do more with less (as has been very succinctly described in SHSMD's "Bridging Worlds.")

By Morgan Atkins

Within healthcare organizations, teams are now a fundamental unit of organization. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues at many companies.

With the emphasis on teamwork, it’s important for the practices of these teams to be thoughtfully considered. Particularly, the common and important team effort of brainstorming new ideas together. “Studies show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction.” The New York Times Magazine reports. Knowing that, we wanted to discuss how brainstorming can be an effective team experience.